I know I'm replying to old information, but hopefully my reply is still relevant, since the discussion has been revived and apprently you haven't found what you were looking for...
I heard that NOV (National Oilwell Varco) takes a lot of trainee. Have you heard of them?
YES! THIS! Have you applied with NOV? NOV was the first company I worked for when I got out of the Navy. They are who trained me first in PLC/VFD/etc. misc industrial electronic/electrical stuff.
They are an excellent company to work for. I was extremely lucky with NOV; in all the right places at all the right times, and always managed to shine the brightest right when I needed to. Usually when you hire on with NOV as a field service tech, they send you through 2-6months of in-house training (even Canadians - they will fly you down to houston and put you up in a condo for the duration of the school) and then you go work land rigs for a few years to prove yourself before they will consider sending you out of country or offshore. I completed my training as a Top Drive FST and they didn't have anywhere to put me at the time, so they sent me to Singapore to help commission a Top Drive as a 3 week long OJT exercise. When I got to singapore and reported to the rig, top drive wasn't there. So I started following the Controls Engineers around and bugging them. They would send me on B.S. go-fer missions and such, until they realized that I was of use, and then I was climbing the derrick, and down to the mud pump room, simulating I/O and such. Before the 3 weeks was up, they were letting me go online with PLCs and even make some supervised programming changes. When the 3 weeks came around, I was balls deep and the the controls engineers called back to Houston and requested I stay on continue helping for another 3 weeks. And again, and again. I ended up spending 15 weeks on that rig, and in that small time had gained enough proficiency with Siemens PLCs that when I finally made it back to Houston, they immediately moved me to the Controls Division. Controls Division didn't know me, or have any local work for me that they thought I could handle solo, so they kicked me back to the training division. Training division didn't have anything for me, so they sent me on another international OJT mission to Korea, where same story happened and I was there for 3 months. When I got back training division sent me to Alberta for jet another OJT. And then transferred me back to Controls Division, which upon actually looking at my record this time, put me in their so-called "international group." I was working on getting my Brazilian Visa so that I could go spend a few month of on-site First Well Support on the rig that I helped commission in Singapore. That's when I had to leave the company due to a personal family emergency. I shot straight to the top - the creme of the crop - in less than a year; something that takes most guys the better half of a decade to accomplish. Most of it was just being in the right place at the right time as I said, and my results are not typical, but the moral of the story is that at NOV, if you're a "hard-charging self-starter" you can do great things, and make lots of money, and you can do it without a degree. They take care of their people.
P.s. They only pay like $15-$19 depending on experience, but you can make a lot more than you would think after rig bonus, hazard pay, per diem; it adds up fast. I made $92K in that one year, at $15/hr. It took a lot of 16hr/day, 7days/wk months to do it though.
Alberta and North Dakota are by far the fastest growing oil and gas developments in the world.
Having talked to guys who worked in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.... if I held a Canadian passport I would head straight for Alberta.
+1
Oil is huge in Alberta and it's a great place to enter the game. Probably on par or better than Asia. You're already Canadian so why not go out there? And NOV is all over the place in Alberta too.